Typically, communication network may need to support real-time traffic for one or more media applications such as audio, video, high definition graphics. Performance of the one or more media applications may be highly dependent on the communication network behavior. The communication network may not be inherently circuit-switched. The communication network may be designed to provide best-effort service for delivery of one or more packets. The communication network may be designed to run across virtually any network transmission media and system platform. Typically latency and jitter may get developed in the communication network especially for differential services due to one or more network conditions such as network congestion, long-haul sessions, burst traffic.
Latency of the one or more packets from a source/intermediate node to destination node may be caused due to the propagation delay, queuing delay and processing delay experienced at the destination node, the source node and one or more intermediate nodes during network transition. Jitter may be caused due to variation in queuing delay at the one or more intermediate nodes and due to dynamic changes in traffic path. For the differential services, most of the queuing delay at the one or more intermediate nodes may be controlled by defining per hop behavior as Expedited Forwarding (EF), which ensures low jitter and low latency at each of the one or more intermediate nodes (as defined in RFCs 1349, 2598, 3246). However, Expedited Forwarding (EF) per hop behavior may fail to intelligently handle the per hop behavior of the packet considering the further delay and jitter that packet could incur during transition towards the destination node.